...for a major meltdown into nostalgia. I've been spending way too much time looking for songs on Youtube, which is why the story is unfolding so slowly. I'm not sure if Cold Chisel ever made it big in North America, but we had a cassette of theirs and used to play these two songs over and over when we were in Australia. What oh what happened to the past 25 years of my life?
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Go Forth and Fail
I'm taking a short story writing course this fall. A woman in the class has just had a book published called Edison's Concrete Piano, which is about great inventors and their flops (although apparently making a piano out of concrete is not as wacky an idea as it sounds). I went to a talk she gave last night at the library about her book, which convinced me that failure makes for great stories (at least if you fail big). My new motto is Go Forth and Fail.
One of the inventions she talked about was Da Vinci's walk-on-water shoes. They never took off in Da Vinci's time, but some wacky Frenchman named Rémy Bricka walked across the Atlantic in 1988. Have you heard of him? Me neither. I would be really, really miffed if I had walked across the Atlantic and didn't become famous for it (maybe it's because he didn't fail spectacularly).
We also heard about Edison's concrete piano; Alexander Graham Bell's six-nippled sheep (an idea whose time has now come in New Zealand, where researchers are breeding multi-nippled sheep; apparently the usual number for them is two); George Davison's popcorn volcano; and J. Walter Christie's flying tank, which sounded wacky to the Americans but not to the Russians.
Well, time to get back to working on my short story. So far it involves the tooth fairy and voodoo. Yes, it's pretty wacky, and will probably be a big failure... but out of that may come a great story.
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As a footnote to this, someone just emailed me a link to J.K. Rowling's address to the 2008 graduating class at Harvard. It was titled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.
One of the inventions she talked about was Da Vinci's walk-on-water shoes. They never took off in Da Vinci's time, but some wacky Frenchman named Rémy Bricka walked across the Atlantic in 1988. Have you heard of him? Me neither. I would be really, really miffed if I had walked across the Atlantic and didn't become famous for it (maybe it's because he didn't fail spectacularly).
We also heard about Edison's concrete piano; Alexander Graham Bell's six-nippled sheep (an idea whose time has now come in New Zealand, where researchers are breeding multi-nippled sheep; apparently the usual number for them is two); George Davison's popcorn volcano; and J. Walter Christie's flying tank, which sounded wacky to the Americans but not to the Russians.
Well, time to get back to working on my short story. So far it involves the tooth fairy and voodoo. Yes, it's pretty wacky, and will probably be a big failure... but out of that may come a great story.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a footnote to this, someone just emailed me a link to J.K. Rowling's address to the 2008 graduating class at Harvard. It was titled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.
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